~ My dad used to call me Fart Blossom, too.

Verbal Privilege

In her poem “North American Time,” Adrienne Rich riffs on the fact that our words, once published, no longer belong to the writer who wrote them, but to the readers who read them. That’s a harmless enough situation — until and unless you encounter readers with an agenda, and especially when those readers have an agenda that is diametrically opposed to your own values.

She writes:

I am writing this in a time
when anything we write
can be used against those we love
where the context is never given
though we try to explain, over and over

Bear with me for what may appear to be a tangent: I happen to believe that I chose to be gay. The reasons for this belief are complicated — too nuanced for a blog post. I have written about this belief, though, in one short story that has been available online since 1998, where I compared not being attracted to women with not liking to eat collard greens. (Again, long story, you gotta read it in context).

A young friend of mine, from a fundamentalist family, who went through one of those Christian ex-gay re-education camps when he was younger, reports to me that the counselors there assigned this story to be read. It appears that the only following my old literary writing has, anywhere, is in these camps, where it is used to guilt innocent gay teenagers into believing that their choices are evil, and that they are sick.

What am I supposed to do with this knowledge? Censor myself? Reach out and try to explain further? Ignore it?

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2 thoughts on “Verbal Privilege”

That’s a rough discovery. Stephen King retired one of his novellas–one of the Bachman books strongly presaged the Columbine shootings, and he took the book out of print afterward. I’ve always had mixed feelings about that.

I think your instance is certainly different–you’re not profiting from violence or trivializing a tragedy. You’re just being honest about your own feelings on own life. And the fact that you do view your sexuality as a choice and *you’re still gay anyway* is meaningful. It’s a point that the people misappropriating your story are missing–but maybe what you need is to find a way to emphasize that point more clearly. It’s certainly a conversation worth having, I think. You won’t reach the people in those programs–and censoring yourself now would be pointless, as they’ve already got copies of the story. But that doesn’t mean that a clarification of your thinking isn’t worth making for others who come on your story in other ways.

I have to say, though, that I’ve often thought that the “sexuality is strictly genetic” tack was a losing argument for our side. Firstly, because it assumes that every human being arrives at their sexuality in exactly the same way, which is an implausible assumption. Secondly, because it assumes that humans have no free will in regards to their romantic pursuits, which is both an implausible assumption and a horrifying one. And thirdly, because the personal experience of too many people, like yourself, simply contradicts that understanding of sexuality.

And in any case, that argument gets us nowhere. Even if a bigot accepts that sexuality isn’t a choice (and some do), the *practicing* of one’s sexuality certainly still is, and that’s what they will focus on.

The point shouldn’t be that we need to accept gay people because they don’t have a choice. The point is, it doesn’t matter if it’s a choice or not, because there’s nothing wrong with being gay in the first place.